Does anyone see a clear reason for the suppression of wifi in the Chinese version of the iPhone? Is it the telecom partner or the Chinese government that objects? It would seem as though there would be almost no point to the iPod touch. Is it currently available in China? I suppose one might infer that there is not much wifi connectivity available in China but that seems hard to believe.

I failed to suppress the pedantic impulse. The apps you get from the App Store have binaries compiled for the ARM architecture cpu. During development the source code is compiled to x86 binaries in order to run in the iPhone simulator on the Mac. You can't actually run your ARM apps in the simulator (there are also issues of cryptographic signing but that is secondary).
Your point remains essentially correct that iPhone apps could easily be recompiled for running on x86...

How's this for a new connectivity option: instead of conventional wifi networking Apple could promote mesh wifi. MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc NETworking) is one of the most significant technologies promoted by the OLPC initiative. Every wifi node already has a radio receiver and transmitter but it is always treated as an end node. With software changes it can route packets to other mesh wifi nodes.
The prospect for portability and ubiquity of such a device could provide a test bed...

Elgato has a fairly inexpensive x.264 hardware encoding USB device for people who want to do faster conversions. When I buy a DVD or want to watch any of the plethora of DVD's I own on my MBP I have to rip it because the crappy authentication software forced on consumers fails abysmally and doesn't allow the purchased disk to play. So I strip the encryption so I can use Apple's DVD playing app which I find to be quite nifty (except for the CSS code which just plain fails)....

I'm puzzled why you are so agitated. If you are managing a MacDonalds I can see that revenue maximization would require that customers get in, eat, and then clear out so more can be accommodated. But this is a Starbucks which will customarily have many individuals with laptops, buying one coffee after another and enjoying an ambiance that is unmistakably different from MacDonalds. It is certainly more inconvenient for the customer to bring along an iMac but what difference...

If you had a closer look at the api's for the Mac and the iPhone, I don't think you would be making such statements. Apple has done such a good job in its Trojan horse strategy that people have incredibly erroneous impressions about the nature of the iPhone OS. Because so many competitors thought iPods were just forays into the media player device realm, they were caught flat-footed when an innovative, expressive, and probably more advanced OS emerged with the iPhone....

Face what? I have an iPod touch rather than an iPhone but they are close to being identical. I've never had a gadget that came even close to being such a high quality piece of technology. I'm astonished they can sell something of this quality for $200. The earbuds that come with it are a piece of junk but I've corrected that.
Also the Macbook Pro is also easily the best quality computer I've owned or used. I've used plenty of Macs (and others) going back to the original...

I'm confused. Opinions will vary and lead to various choices. I vastly prefer OSX and other Apple products but I still own a PC running XP. I also have XP installed on my MacBook Pro so I can boot it up when I want to (not very often, but it is there). I run across news about Microsoft because it permeates tech news. But I don't seek it out on sites that focus on it. I would consider that a waste of my time.
Is there any reason besides knee-jerk trolling to seek out people...

What you are describing there sounds like the sandboxing security feature of mobile OS X. Apps on the iPhone simply do not have transparent access to each others file directories. This is part of a legitimate effort to prevent this new platform from becoming a cesspool of malware unlike what MS attitudes and carelessness lead to in the past.